Марта Уэллс: Fugitive Telemetry

It’s also not like I didn’t know what the real problem was. I’m not a bot, I’m not a human, so I don’t fit into any neat category. Also, I hate being patronized. (The whole bot-guardian system is like an attraction field for humans who like to be patronizing.)

Resuming the conversation with me, the bot said, query?

Because I could tell it was already running a search against its visual archives, I answered with a copy of the alert Mensah had gotten from Station Security.

It hummed aloud, surprise and dismay, another imitation human reaction. I would have been more annoyed if it hadn’t also just produced a query result: an image of the dead human in mid-stride, passing through the door into one of the hostel corridors.

Hah, got you. Query: room?

The bot said, query: ID? It couldn’t find the room assignment without the dead human’s ID. Or at least the ID the dead human had been using.

I said, ID unknown . We were going to have to do this a different way. Query: rooms plus target corridor = engaged plus without resident plus target time .

The bot ran another search and delivered thirty-six results, all assigned rooms where the occupant was not currently present and was known to have exited the hostel before the dead human’s estimated time of death. The bot added, entry re: unoccupied maintenance inspection authorized . Concern: privacy . Query: item examine?

The bot was authorized to make inspections of unoccupied rooms to check for maintenance issues and was implying I could come along, if I told it what I wanted to see, and if it didn’t think it was a privacy violation.

It would be nice to look for memory clips or other data storage devices, especially if they were concealed data storage devices. But to make an ID I thought I only needed to see one thing. I told it, clothing .

Acknowledge, the bot said. It pulled its arms in and led the way toward the target corridor.

We checked seventeen of the currently empty rooms, and while the bot didn’t let me touch anything, it did open the clothing storage cubbies so I could see the contents in the rooms where the humans hadn’t left their stuff strewn all over the bed and desk. It didn’t need to do that in the eighteenth room. It was fairly neat but the scarf draped over the chair was the same style of pattern as the dead human’s shirt, but in a different color combination.

It could easily have been a coincidence, the style and pattern could have been popular and cheap at some transit station hub. And even with the image it wasn’t actually a positive ID. But Station Security could make it a positive ID with a thorough search of the room and a DNA match.

I created a quick report with images of the scarf, the location of the room, and the feed ID associated with it (name: Lutran, gender: male), and the room-use record, which indicated that Lutran had been registered here for two station cycles. I included the bot’s authorization to view the rooms, and sent it off to Station Security tagged for Senior Indah and Tech Tural. (Station Security was used to getting messages from me about their completely inadequate arrangements for Mensah’s security.) I sent a copy to the hostel bot so it would know what was going on if they came to ask it questions. Then I signaled that I was leaving.

It followed me back through the corridors to the lobby, where a few new humans had arrived and were standing in front of a kiosk like they had never seen anything like it before. It went to help them, but sent me query: next action?

I still didn’t have enough for a real threat assessment. I should go back to monitoring Mensah’s security arrangements while lurking in the hotel near the admin offices and watching media. I didn’t think I’d hear from Station Security again. (Or at least not about this; I figured they would come up with other ways to try to get rid of me.) I’d have to get intel on their investigation through Mensah’s council channels. To get the bot to leave me alone, I answered, task complete .

I was already out the door when the bot said, query: arrivals data, meaning I should look for the dead human in the transit ring and its traveler records.

I didn’t respond because I don’t need a critique from a “free” bot and I couldn’t access the arrivals data without Station Security’s permission anyway, and fuck that.

Huh, I just thought of another way to do it.

It was annoying that the “free” bot was right, but I needed to go to the transit ring.

Preservation’s transit ring wasn’t that big compared to the major Corporation Rim hubs. Or even to the non-major Corporation Rim hubs. It had only one entry/exit point for passengers, near the booking kiosks where you could search for berths on the docked transports offering passage. There was another entry/exit point for crews of private ships and cargo-only transports in the Merchant Docks, and Dead Lutran might have come in through that section, but it made more sense statistically to start at the public entrance.

This being Preservation, there was a nice waiting area to one side of the transit ring’s entry hall for humans to sit and figure out what they were doing, with couches and chairs and a mosaic floor with tiled images of the planet’s flora and fauna, all tagged in the feed with detailed descriptions. Wooden conical structures that were duplicates of the first shelters used on the planet sat around, most of them holding information kiosks or displays for visitors.

I found a chair behind yet another plant biome (a big one, with reedy plants in a simulated stream) and sat down.

I had an ID that Dead Lutran must have used on entry in order to get a room assignment for transient housing. Finding the ship he had come in on could be an important data point. Based on the tech used to create his clothes, I was betting he had come here from the Corporation Rim and not another non-corporate political entity, station or whatever, but it would be nice to be sure.

I could hack the port’s transient arrivals system but I had said I wouldn’t, so I wouldn’t. Also, it seemed pointless to do it just to run a search that Tural and the other Station Security techs could run as soon as they bothered to read my report. But just asking for information had worked really well the first time so I decided to try it again.

I leaned back in the chair, told my drones to form a sensor perimeter, and verified that my inputs for the constant cycle of checks for Dr. Mensah’s sentry task group were all still open. Then I closed my eyes and slipped into the feed.

Transports don’t hang out on the feed constantly downloading (not that there’s anything wrong with constantly downloading) but they do access it to keep in contact with the transit ring’s scheduling and alerts channels, and also to allow local feed access to any humans on board.

I had to sort through the hundreds of different connections currently attached to the station feed in the transit ring, humans, augmented humans, bots, bot pilots, small and large scale port systems, all interlinked and busy doing their jobs. Or in most of the humans’ cases, wandering around. I was looking for the distinctive profiles of transports, which were different from any of the other connections. I could have done this a lot more easily by walking around from hatch to hatch and using the comm to contact each transport directly, but it would have been ridiculously obvious that I was doing something, even if the humans couldn’t tell what it was.

(The humans not being able to tell what I was doing just guaranteed that whatever they assumed I was doing would be way, way worse than me having a brief comm interaction with each transport in dock, trying to get info for stupid Station Security.)